I need a bit of help.
 

Please allow me to explain the title.

I need to make a project for school, and for that I chose the subject of Manga. This project is very important, because it decides around a quarter of my final grade, plus if it isn't good enough I'm not even allowed to participate in the final exams.

Anyway, I was looking around for information about Manga, and came to a conclusion that there are either little sites with decent information, or I search in a wrong way. So I would like to ask the forum-members who are interested in Manga and anime to give me some links to sites about manga.
Pretty please?

(I wasn't too sure about where this should go, so I posted this in the general thread.)

Have you tried looking at actual books instead of on the web?

http://www.animenfo.com/

*shrug* I like it...

What kind of report are you doing? If its just a general kind of "Do a report," then try to find something a little bit more specific, like a specific manga. You could do something like a book report, talking about the subtle points of that specific media (and use those words, big words make you look smart).

Anyway, we need more info. What class is this for? Middle School, High School, or College? You could try just researching general japanese culture...

I don't know, come back with a little more info.

Yea, more info would be appreciated Melfice. If you can tell us the topic for the report and how much info you need, I'm sure I can find something for you.

I suppose I could chip in what little I know as well... I am quite exposed to manga myself.

Well, it's about manga and anime and it's influence in western comics and how popular it is now in the western world.

But basically any info about the origin of manga and anime and how it became so... recognisible (sp?) is welcome.

As for books, I also use them, but more info is, in some cases, better as you get more angles and different views on the subject.
And MoM, thank you for the link. I'm sure It will be of help.

And Aerodynamic, I'm not really sure what you would call my type of class... We have a different system here in the Netherlands. I'm in something we call "middelbare school"(Dutch), which would translate to middle school, however, you might want to explain how old one is in the different classes you discribed.

Origin of manga.

http://www.animeinfo.org/animeu/core102-l1.html

Gotta love animeinfo.

I don't know if you're able to order books online, or if your library has a really good interlibrary loan policy or not, but if you can manage either, a couple good books come to mind: Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation by Antonia Levi, and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

The first is a little out-of-date -- written well before the late '90s-early '00s anime boom -- and is mostly focused on anime, but the Japanese cultural issues she talks about are still relevant. She also goes into the symbols that tend to get used pretty heavily in both quite often, and if I remember rightly there's also some good stuff about Rumiko Takahashi in there.

The second book is much broader in scope, but it's still extremely valuable if you're studying "sequential art" of any kind. It's kinda hard to sum up accurately, so I'm just going to quote the Amazon review: "McCloud, in an incredibly accessible style, explains the details of how comics work: how they're composed, read and understood. More than just a book about comics, this gets to the heart of how we deal with visual languages in general". There's also a section about manga in particular, which quickly deals with its styles, techniques, and possible influence on Western comics, but again, this was written a good while before you could see Pokemon or Dragonball on TV any old time you wanted, so it really was mostly a "possible" influence at the time. It's still worth reading -- the concepts he talks about apply to all comics, no matter where they're written.

Hope this is helpful in some way, and not just me running my yap about neat books. :)

Well, I guess the type of school isn't really that important, more just the specific class, but I think I have an idea of what you're doing now.

My suggestion, take some Manga and take some non-japanese comics that you would say were "influenced" by manga, cite them, and explain the similarities. Also, go over the basic original style of both branches and how each has evolved over the years (to go with your original arguement, you might have to explain how American or European comics have started out with one specific style and then gone on to "copy" some of the elements of manga).

Of course, I'm talking about this as if it were a literature paper, and I don't know if that is the case. As for actual websites or books to cite, I'm kind of out. I guess if the deadline sneaks up on you and you really need a source, then wikipedia might be of service (en.wikipedia.org for the english language page), but wikipedia might not be the most correct source you could find.

Those books recommended by Mashirosen look pretty promising... as well as pretty interesting.